What's New in Securly Classroom 7.4?

Chat Window Thumbnail
The chat window now displays a thumbnail of the student screen directly below the student list. This makes it easier to keep a general idea of what a student is doing while engaged in the chat. The thumbnail also updates when moving from student to student without closing the chat window.

Student-Initiated Chat
Students can now initiate a chat with the teacher if the option is enabled by the teacher for the class session.  Teachers can choose to enable or disable this feature from the class options when starting or scheduling a class. Students can access this feature by clicking on the extension icon and choosing "Start Chat". The feature operates independently of the "Hand Raise" feature, which can also be enabled or disabled by the teacher.

Limit Maximum Open Tabs
Teachers can now limit the maximum number of tabs a student may have open during a class session.  Previously they could only restrict this during the Site Lock. The Start Class option and class scheduling options are now available. When class starts, all tabs beyond the max will be closed automatically.

 
Teacher Display Name for Chat
Teachers can now set a "Display Name" that will appear when identifying the teacher to the student during the Chat and Announce features.  This can be used for entering the name by which students address the teacher rather than their full name.  Settings can be found in the My Account option.

 Site Lock Without Opening Tabs
A new option in Site Lock allows locking devices to a list of sites without forcing all the tabs to open on the student devices. This is useful when teachers create a large list of sites that they want to allow students to be able to browse during class, but don't necessarily need to open them all on the student devices. This works well when the list of sites is saved as a Web Collection for single-click access.

Other New Items

• It's now possible to clone an existing web link.  This is particularly useful for web links that have dependencies by saving re-entry of dependencies when creating a link to a different page on the same site.
• The print function on the device view now includes a list of open tabs.
• An alert sound is now playing on the student device for incoming chats from the teacher.
• The Announcement window now includes the teacher's name and time stamp.

Fixes

• The number of chrome devices shown on the dashboard is not always correct.
• When the announcement permission was disabled, the feature still worked from Device View even though it was properly disabled on the thumbnail view screen.